No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

It is a certain sign of a wise government and proceeding, when it can hold men’s hearts by hopes, when it cannot by satisfaction.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Envy is the basis of democracy.

All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.

No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed or outlawed or exiled, or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him, nor will we send against him except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.